This work by Middle East Monitor is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.
Women protestors chant and wave Palestinian flags during a mass demonstration to protest the starvation crisis in Gaza, in Rabat Morocco on July 20 2025. [ISSAM ZERROK/Hans Lucas/AFP via Getty Images]
Hundreds of doctors in Morocco participated in a one-day hunger strike on Thursday to protest Israel’s starvation of Palestinians in the Gaza Strip.
The hunger strike came in response to a call from the Moroccan non-governmental organisation “Doctors for Palestine”.
A Moroccan doctor, Ahmed Zeroual, who is participating in the strike, told Anadolu Agency that the one-day hunger strike aims to show solidarity with medical personnel in Gaza and to protest the starvation imposed by Israel on Palestinians.
Dr Zeroual added that it also comes within the context of global solidarity with the Palestinian cause.
He explained that doctors in the Kingdom are trying to draw attention to the suffering of medical personnel in Gaza and the Palestinians as a whole due to the Israeli blockade imposed on the Strip.
Dr Zeroual noted that hundreds of doctors from across the country have responded to the call and participated in the hunger strike.
Dr Zeroual, an oral and maxillofacial surgeon, spent six weeks in Gaza hospitals during March and April.
Ghassan Abu-Sittah and other health workers hold press conference after Israeli attacks on Gaza’s hospitals, October 2023. Source: Ghassan Abu-Sittah/X
A judge in a German court ruled that the ban on activity imposed on renowned Dr. Ghassan Abu-Sittah was unlawful.
The Palestine Congress in Berlin, which was organized in mid-April of last year, was violently shut down by the police on its first day, just minutes after it began. The pretext for this action, which was deemed unlawful by attorneys, was a live-stream of Palestinian historian Dr. Salman Abu Sitta.
His nephew, the doctor Ghassan Abu-Sittah, was banned from entering Germany on the morning of April 12, 2024. He had arrived on a flight from the UK, was detained and questioned for hours at Berlin airport, and then deported. He was also told that he was banned from practicing any political activities in Germany for the month of April, even from abroad. The organizers of the conference are taking legal action against the dissolution of the event, the trial of which is ongoing.
Witness to the genocide wins in Berlin
But Ghassan Abu-Sittah won a victory on Tuesday, July 15, at Berlin’s Administrative Court (Verwaltungsgericht). From the UK, the doctor had filed a lawsuit against the actions of the German authorities. The surgeon and rector of the University of Glasgow has worked as a doctor in a dozen war and crisis zones over the course of his life, including the Gaza Strip. Shortly after the genocide began in October 2023, he went there again as part of a “Doctors Without Borders” mission to provide aid at Al-Shifa Hospital. The hospital was repeatedly attacked and ultimately destroyed by the Israeli army in November 2023 and again in March/April 2024. Israeli forces massacred hundreds of doctors, patients, and refugees.
The court’s judge ruled that the ban on activity imposed on Abu-Sittah was unlawful. According to a spokeswoman for the court, there was no sufficient evidence that Abu-Sittah’s statements posed a threat to Germany’s constitutional order or public safety. In particular, the authorities were unable to produce any statements by the renowned doctor that referred positively to the Palestinian resistance’s “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation or even to possible war crimes committed by the Palestinian resistance. Even if such a danger had existed, a preventive ban on the doctor’s activities would have been disproportionate.
The spokesperson also pointed out that Abu-Sittah was heard as an eyewitness to the genocide in the International Criminal Court proceedings against Israeli government politicians, and was also announced as such at the Palestine Congress.
Racist repression
His lawyer, Alexander Gorki, explained on request: “The hearing showed that the ban on activities was unlawful from start to finish. What was to be sanctioned via the residency rights were opinions expressed by my client, who knew the situation on the ground in Gaza very well as a Palestinian and a doctor.” The court “put a stop to the abuse of immigration law”. However, the ruling will not prevent the immigration authorities from abusing their power in the future, warns the migration law expert. To counter this, “political pressure is needed”.
In fact, the repressive authorities in Germany have been using all kinds of tricks and legal means for years to bypass the courts and exert pressure on the Palestinian solidarity movement and Palestinians in Germany: from expulsions and deportations, to bans on organizing, employment bans and the cancellation of welfare benefits. Migrants and refugees with a precarious status are particularly affected. Just two weeks ago, on the orders of a court, Musaab Abu Atta, a Palestinian refugee and political activist, was released from four months of custody. The public prosecutor’s office is trying to lock him up again because of an alleged “flight risk”, even though he has a fiancée and a job in Berlin. At the same time, there are indications that they want to deport him to Syria.
Leon Wystrychowski is a former member of the Palästina Solidarität Duisburg (Palestine Solidarity Duisburg, PSDU).
NHS logo. Resident doctors in England will strike later this month after being offered a 5.4% pay rise, which the government say will not be revisited.
Resident doctors’ 29% pay claim is non-negotiable, reasonable and easily affordable for the NHS, the new leader of the medical profession has said.
Strikes to ensure resident – formerly junior – doctors in England get the full 29% could drag on for years, according to Dr Tom Dolphin, the British Medical Association’s new council chair.
The doctors’ union will not negotiate on or accept a lower figure because that is the extent of the real-terms loss of earnings resident doctors have suffered since 2008, which they want restored – in full – Dolphin told the Guardian in his first interview since taking over last month.
The 29% demand is not up for negotiation “because it’s based on a principle”, said Dolphin, a consultant anaesthetist. “If we picked a different number, that wouldn’t achieve the pay restoration. So that’s why it looks inflexible.”
Dolphin blamed the five-day strike that tens of thousands of resident doctors plan to stage later this month on Wes Streeting, the health secretary, giving them a 22% pay rise over two years last year but not following it up with an award this year to take account of the 29% claim. He said the disruption that the 120-hour walkout would cause was his fault, not theirs.
Vote Labour for Genocide.Keir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.Keir “I support Zionism without Qualification” Starmer supporting genocide.
Louisa Compton, Channel 4 Head of News and Current Affairs and Specialist Factual and Sport said
The job of journalists is to tell the stories that people need to know. Often, that means telling stories that other people, the people who are subjects of our investigations, would rather were not heard.
Few situations in the world today have illustrated those two truisms more clearly than the October 7 massacres in Israel and the 21 months of Israel’s military campaign in Gaza that followed.
One of the ways in which the reality of that situation has been reported – and to many people’s way of thinking has been under-reported – is the story of how the fighting has embroiled the medical services operating in Gaza.
On Wednesday night, Channel 4 will screen Gaza: Doctors Under Attack,a documentary produced during much of that long period of conflict, which offers powerful evidence that the doctors, nurses and paramedics of Gaza have been denied the non-combatant protection that the norms of warfare usually offer them.
Their hospitals have become combat zones, their very operating theatres have been conscripted into the military theatre of operations.
One side says this has happened through the deliberate choice of their enemy. The other side says it is an unavoidable result of their enemy’s tactics.
Perhaps this is the new normal of warfare, because the whole conflict, from the first murderous moments of the October 7th massacre of innocents to the latest report of machine guns aimed at food queues, has shifted norms in disturbing ways.
In this particular aspect, each side accuses the other of denying medicine its neutrality. The Israel Defence Force says Hamas uses hospitals, patients and medical staff as shields for terrorist headquarters; Gaza’s health authorities and medics accuse the IDF of besieging those hospitals, forcibly evacuating those patients, detaining, terrorising, brutalising and targeting those doctors, nurses and support staff.
In video that is terribly hard to watch and with testimony delivered through tears and anguish, this documentary presents evidence that Israel’s armed forces have deliberately dragged those offering medical aid into the frontline. It also reports the IDF’s strong denials of allegations that medics were tortured.
We are showing this programme because we believe that, following thorough fact-checking and verification, we are presenting a duly impartial view of a subject that both divides opinion and frequently provokes dispute about what constitutes a fact.
Channel 4 has a strong tradition of putting uncomfortable reporting in front of our audiences. In doing so, we know we will antagonise somebody somewhere sometime. But we do it because we believe it is our duty to tell important journalistic stories – especially those that aren’t being told elsewhere.
21.50 edit: Louisa Compton, Channel 4 Head of News and Current Affairs and Specialist Factual and Sport continued
Doctors Under Attack, was commissioned by another broadcaster which took a different view of the original content and decided not to broadcast it.
That other broadcaster will have had its own reasons for not showing the programme. For ourselves, after rigorous fact-checking and assessing the film against our own editorial criteria as well as against all regulatory requirements, we decided that it was both compliant with the Ofcom Broadcasting Code, but also that it was important journalism in the public interest. Any small changes were carried out with the producers to update the film and give viewers as much information as possible.
The result is harrowing, no doubt. It will make people angry, whichever side they take, or if they take no side.
But while we would never judge anyone who decides that showing something could create a risk of being thought to be taking sides, we believe there are times when the same risk is run by not showing anything at all.
dizzy: The other broadcaster referred to is BBC.
Genocide denier and Current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer is quoted that he supports Zionism without qualification. He also confirms that UK air force support has been essential in Israel’s mass-murdering genocide. Includes URLs https://www.declassifieduk.org/keir-starmers-100-spy-flights-over-gaza-in-support-of-israel/ and https://youtu.be/O74hZCKKdpAKeir Starmer objects to criticism of the IDF. He asks how could anyone obect to them starving people to death, forced marches like the Nazis did, bombing Gaza’s hospitals and universities,mass-murdering journalists, healthworkers and starving people queuing for food, killing and raping prisoners and murdering children. He calls for people to stop obstructing his genocide for Israel.UK Labour Party government ministers Keir Starmer, Angela Rayner and Rachel Reeves explain that they are partners complicit in Israel’s Gaza genocide. The UK has provided Israel with arms, military and air force support. They explain that they don’t do gas chambers but do do forced marches, starvation, destroy hospitals, mass-murders of journalists and healthcare workers.
